ethereum promises to favour the 'letter' of the law (i.e. “code”) over the 'spirit' (i.e. intention of contract authors) yet the response to the attack shows one way a partially decentralised group can favour the 'spirit' over the 'letter' (i.e. softfork/hardfork)

“There are also a class of total languages (Coq, Agda, Idris) that are guaranteed to terminate but admit (polymorphic) recursion. This is stronger than FOL but weaker than turing-completeness, and certainly sufficient to implement any feasible contract.” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11941758